Described herein are aspects generally related to communication systems, and more particularly, to receiving packets over aggregated connections in a wireless communication system.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various telecommunication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, and broadcasts. Typical wireless communication systems may employ multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access technologies include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems, and time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) systems.
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. An example of a telecommunication standard is Long Term Evolution (LTE). LTE is a set of enhancements to the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) mobile standard promulgated by Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). It is designed to better support mobile broadband Internet access by improving spectral efficiency, lower costs, improve services, make use of new spectrum, and better integrate with other open standards using OFDMA on the downlink (DL), SC-FDMA on the uplink (UL), and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology. However, as the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, there exists a need for further improvements in LTE technology. Preferably, these improvements should be applicable to other multi-access technologies and the telecommunication standards that employ these technologies.
In LTE, a user equipment (UE) can communicate with multiple access points over multiple connections where the connections are aggregated to improve efficiency of communication. For example, each of the connections can be of different radio access technologies (e.g., LTE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 WiFi, etc.) and may be aggregated at a packet data convergence protocol (PDCP) layer such that the UE may receive different ordered packets over each connection for reordering, combining, and providing to an upper communication layer.
In addition, various technologies are supported in LTE where the UE can configure one or more dormant periods of time during which the UE does not communicate, such as an off cycle of a connected mode discontinuous reception (C-DRX) configuration during which the UE can sleep or power down communication resources, a period of time between semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) resources configured for the UE by the LTE access point, etc. It is possible that one or more of the dormant periods of time occur before a next packet in a sequence is received from the LTE access point. In this example, one or more additional aggregated connections may continue to transmit packets to the UE, but the UE must buffer these packets in a reorder buffer until the next packet in the sequence is received from the LTE access point (e.g., once the dormant period ends, such as after the C-DRX off duration or based on the next configured SPS resources) before providing the packets to an upper layer for processing. This can cause significant buffer memory constraints, negatively impact throughput, etc. at the UE.